Like Ice on a Cactus – Finding the Unexpected

Has this ever happened to you:

The final edition of a paper is at long last completed. You’ve worked on it for weeks. Drafts have come and gone. Your writing has been through peer review. Your professor has even looked through parts. Sentences have been tweaked to perfection. You’ve printed it out and it looks beautiful! BUT, just as you go to hand it in you notice a typo! Ouch! After all of that work…

Why does this happen and what can we do about it?

We live and breathe our final papers for an intense period of time, during which the reading and reviewing of our writing can get a little sloppy. Both our eyes and our minds become fatigued. When we read silently to ourselves we tend to read fast and we tend to read what we think we see, or what we thought we wrote, not what is actually in front of us.

For example, this sentence looked perfect to me for months: This project will focus on three gardens located on the hostipal grounds. But, when I went to turn in my paper I noticed that I needed to make clear that I was going to do my research in a hospital, not a hostipal!

So, my advice this week: as you go through the finally editing stage of your work, read your writing out loud and slowly. If you do this, you will say what is actually on the page and you will catch more little errors. Your tongue will trip on words that you would not have gotten stuck on had you been reading silently. Even if you have previously reviewed your work (possibly many times before) you may find the unexpected.

Good luck this week! And, please share with us any tips that you may have!

P.S. I also find it helpful to print a copy of the assignment I am working on rather than just editing on my computer screen. For those who don’t do this out of concern for our trees – use scrap paper! It’s better to do this than to have to print a second final paper.